The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Alice, Mr. Tivoli is here to check … the paint you said? Say hello, dear girl, and maybe wipe your hands, thank you.”

  Alice’s deep brown hair was up; she looked like a woman. She stood up from the settee and set down her book (From the Earth to the Moon, the distance between us in that room, my dear).

  “Well, gee, hi there, Mr. Tivoli,” she said mockingly as she smiled and shook my hand. These were the most ordinary gestures, given to me as she gave them to all others. I searched desperately for some sign that something dear was hidden for me in this routine, but very quickly she was sitting back on the couch, lifting her book. She wore the strangest dress of gossamer satin, which had a sheen of age about it that had probably gone unnoticed in candlelight. Some hairs clung to the fabric, burnished gold hanging on a sleeve. The light was ribboned throughout her hair, which was parted and coiled elaborately around her head as it might be for a dinner party. These were not the costumes Mother and I had seen them wearing that morning on their way to temple. They had been playing in the closet, and they had done each other’s hair. So this was what lonely women did the whole Sabbath day long.

  “You both look nice,” I said, and grimaced, trying to shake the burlap from my tongue.

  Mrs. Levy smiled conspiratorially at Alice, who finally turned human in my presence: she blushed. She touched her hair, sighing and looking everywhere but at me and her mother, as if searching for some escape from the room in which she had been caught playing dress-up with her old mother. I had done this; I had made a little flame under her skin. I took the moment—snip—and coiled it in the enamel locket of my heart.

  Mrs. Levy sat, motioning for me to sit as well. She turned to her burning daughter. “You know, Alice, a cup of tea would really hit the spot right now, wouldn’t it?”

  Alice said, “Ugh,” then stared angrily at her book.

  Mrs. Levy looked warmly at me. She sat perfectly motionless and lovely, knees to the side so that her dress could fit in the chair, and I saw she had already loosened her bustle so that it lay more naturally. It must have been an old dress, something from her courtship with Mr. Levy long ago in Philadelphia, a shimmering vestige of girlhood and vanity.

  And she continued to look at me, signaling something from deep inside her eyes. I looked back to Alice, who sulked in the settee, then to her mother and that mysterious smile.

  “Where’s Tillie?” I asked, referring to their maid.

  Mrs. Levy shook her head. “A family emergency. Somebody’s died, I think, or is going to die. In Sonoma, so we’re all alone.”

  A tilt of her head, a blink of the eyes. What was she trying to tell me?

  “Shall I make tea?” I ventured.

  The room released its breath. Mrs. Levy laughed again and Alice let out a little snort of amusement, shaking the ebony wreaths of her hair, twisting the ribbons of light all over.

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Alice?”

  “Oh, absolutely wonderful, Mother. Stunning.”

  Her mother shot her a mean look. “I appreciate it, Mr. Tivoli.”

  I went into the kitchen, utterly perplexed. There, the tea things were already set out on a silver platter. I lit the gas of the stove in that old kitchen where I used to sit beside John Chinaman as he haggled with the bread and fish vendors who came to this back door. I boiled the water and made the tea while Mrs. Levy stood there in the room with me, humming something under her breath. And then, with no help from her at all, nothing but the encouragement of her pearl-drop eyes, I arranged the tea things in the parlor directly in front of Alice, who gave me a little breath of gratitude before setting at the cherry cake. I sat back. I realized they had been sitting in the parlor all afternoon, distracting themselves with hair and costumes, weary, thirsty, and half starved.

  I was a fool; I had seen so little of the world that I didn’t know what the Jewish Sabbath might mean to the Levys. Hughie, who had somehow heard of these things, informed me that my Levys had to get gentiles to do for them what they could not do for themselves. Heating or even serving tea for themselves was forbidden, he said, shrugging his shoulders. Another boy of Hughie’s acquaintance knew even more, earning his pocket money by working at Temple Beth El as their “Shabbos goy,” as he called it. “They pay me to put out the candles,” he said, smiling. “Or take tickets. It’s crazy. And they don’t even pay me, they leave the money in a little pile, like they forgot it there.” This boy (redhaired, skinny, whom Hughie liked but whose name I have forgotten) told me their holy book forbade my Levys from even enjoying a candle that one of us had lit unless we lit it for our own pleasure before they entered the room. I imagined Alice waiting in her dark bedroom for me to enter, pretending I had lit the candle for myself. There she would sit, gauging my own pleasure at the flame before enjoying it herself—would this be nothing less than love? It was as close as I dared get.

  In reality, I did very few of these tasks for the Levys. Their maid, Tillie, though Irish Catholic, was a veritable clairvoyant in their household, understanding the least squint or shiver to mean the fire must be built again or the gaslights brought up a little. She knew which sighs meant tea, which tosses of the hair meant bathwater should be run, and though sometimes I heard the furious shouts as Mrs. Levy caught her stirring beef gravy with a milk spoon, and watched as the angry mother stomped out back to bury the defiled object, Tillie kept the Levys in the same great middle-class comfort that we, upstairs, Protestantly free to boil Saturday tea, were enjoying. I wonder, though, how devout they really were; I’ve learned since that some of their practices were unusually lax, and that neither of them really believed in God. But they did keep up this Sabbath ritual, even if, in truth, they rarely needed me to aid them.

  But memory reverses, sometimes. The things we did every day diminish into specks and unequaled events, chance encounters, bloom like ink spots on the page. So while the Levys only needed me on rare occasions, these are the times I remember from those months at South Park when they lived below us. I usually brought Hughie along for reassurance, and once he even came with Mother, on one of her few outings in the months before my sister was born, to a meal at the Levys. We all dressed carefully and had a few sips of sherry before we made our way down, and I had the time of my life because, somehow, with joke-cracking Hughie to distract the mothers, Alice at last began to notice me. Seated between me and my friend, she paid no attention to the younger man but kept drawing letters in her potatoes that I tried to mimic in my own, and while I knew this was a childish game we were playing, I pretended that these were messages for me, and that if I paid attention she might spell out some urgent call for love.

  “Alice! What are you doing! And Mr. Tivoli, I’m ashamed of you. A man of your age. But you’re forgiven as long as you tell us the story of that chain around your neck.”

  Alice leaned forward and touched my necklace. “Nineteen forty-one. What does it mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The year the world’s gonna end?”

  Hughie broke in and said it was the number of stagecoaches I’d robbed as Black Bart, which made the women laugh and forget my little golden tombstone, which I now hid under my cravat. I looked away from the conversation. Mirrors were set between the windows of the room and so gave me a view alternating between a scene of the backyard—in which an orange cat crawled across the lawn—and each of our reflections:

  There was Mother, in her pearls and a jacketed charcoal dress that she had altered following a pattern in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She had an air of such elegant patience in the lustred light of the room that, rather than looking like a woman on hard times, she seemed like a duchess fleeing from her country in the costume of her maid. There in the window was the cat, padding through the grass. There was Mrs. Levy in curled Roman hairdo, canted forward with her head on her gathered hands, touching everybody with her intelligent eyes, as in a ritual. Now she looked at me with those light-catching girandole eyes, now she turned them on my mother. There, in the
next window, the burning tail of the cat on its quest. Hughie, florid and sweating a little, was dressed all in butternut as if he were a Rebel soldier or a man heading out to picnic, touching and adjusting his oddly small-knotted bow tie in a gesture that might have been uncertainty or pride. In the window, the cat was on the fence, hovering, considering a leap into the darkness of the next yard. And there was Alice. Plainly dressed, neck long as a plume, hair up and womanly, she fondled her borrowed earrings with polished fingers, turned away from Hughie’s joking as if from a burning thing. I froze and tried not to let her know I saw: there was Alice, sideways in the mirror, looking at me at last. The cat leapt out of sight, a flame off to another hell.

  I should explain the wetted ink; these are not tears. Last night we had a thunderstorm.

  We never had these in my San Francisco, so I hope I am not revealing my location too much by saying the hills east of this flat town act as nets, bagging us eel-swarms of electricity. I am unused to storms, and tend to bark and huddle like the family dog. In a way, this is useful, since it keeps my childish cover, but I don’t want to be this sort of child. I want to be your sort, Sammy, the shouting kind, the brave kind. But there I am under the bed with Buster, both of us bristling and shivering away until the woman of the house comes to flick on the lights. Is it old-fashioned of me to abhor the electric?

  Last night it burglarized the middle of a dream. I was with Alice again, in love again. I won’t give you the details, doctors. All I will say is it was a lily pond of Alices, old and young, in aprons and dresses and pearls, and I was happy in my dream until it was bloodied by a stab of thunder.

  “Alice?” I cried without thinking.

  “Shut up,” Sammy called from his bunk above me, and went back to sleep.

  Light bloomed across the ceiling. The dog and I froze, awaiting the end of the world. A wait, a wait, you can never be ready enough, then it comes on—gotcha!—fresh as hate.

  I must have screamed a little. Sammy groaned and called me a filthy name.

  Buster was in my bed now, skinny and quivering like a tuning fork, staring at me with his little-girl eyes. He smelled of garbage but I could not put him out, so I pulled him towards me. He was operatically grateful but got nervous, lost his footing, and fell on top of me so doggishly that we both yelped and, embarrassed, scuttled in the sheets before the next blast of the fox hunt. A flash, a roar. We were a pile of fools.

  A light went on in the hall; at least the current was still on. “You boys okay?” came your mother’s voice.

  “Yes!” I said.

  Sammy: “Duckbrain’s pissing his pants.”

  She came to me and held me. She smelled of sleep and cream and singed electric bed warmer. She cooed a boy’s name in my ear. Then she patted my arm three times and left, taking tremulous Buster with her, and I felt, for once, as if it might have all been worth it.

  “Jesus Christ,” came your voice, Sammy, from above. You sighed, fell back asleep in the snore I know so well. The thunder made a long, dull quake in me.

  I will keep writing. These are not tears, these are not tears.

  Mrs. Levy always let me know when Tillie would be gone. She had all kinds of ways, but mostly she left a card with a corner torn, and every Saturday when we returned and went through the silver card receiver in the front hall, I longed to find her little message there. The moment I found the card, I went downstairs and, often as not, discovered the two of them in some kind of desperate situation that needed the slightest help from a gentile’s hand to set aright.

  One Friday evening, for instance, after I had been dining with Hughie on Market Street, where we’d glimpsed Mammie Pleasant, the voodoo witch, Maggie opened the door for me and showed me the card receiver, knowing I was always eager to find a message; I think she knew it had to do with a girl. I found the card with some excitement, but first I went to Mother in the sewing room and exchanged versions of our days while her sewing bird held another golden gown so recently dyed widow-black. I listened and nodded and finally withdrew and raced to the Levys’ door, but no one answered. I rang a few times, and was about to give up when I heard a gleaming voice coming from around the side of the house: “Mr. Tivoli! We’re out back!”

  And there they were, sitting in the chill of the San Francisco summer night, in their warmest clothes. It was a sad scene: they had dragged their parlor’s tête-à-tête out into the yard and were sitting on it doing embroidery by the light of the moon. Mrs. Levy wore beautiful furs I had never seen before, one of those enormous hats that ladies wore in the eighties, a dark tornado of feathers, and pale suede gloves that did not match. Alice was also in fur, a thin sealskin much too large for her, and a fur cap that made her eyes, in moonlight, seem like precious things brought round the Horn. They dropped their threads and laughed to see me. I discovered later they had been like this for hours.

  It was unclear what had gone wrong; they knew Tillie was away visiting a dying relative, so Alice had lit the gaslights just before sunset and they had sat down to a good briskety Sabbath meal. Then—perhaps the gas cut out, or an open window brought a breeze—every light went out and they were thrust into cold and darkness; they had not even built a fire. So here they were, too tired to go and visit friends but too bored to sit in a dark room, talking to the taciturn ghosts of my grandparents through the walls. They had gathered their warmest family furs, carried the tête-à-tête into the moonbright yard, and continued their evening’s activities, laughing and telling stories to each other in the brisk night air.

  “I think I’ll light your gas again,” I said, having learned the way to phrase this thing.

  “Oh no!” Mrs. Levy objected, this time more seriously than usual. “No, it’s lovely like this. Bring a coat, Mr. Tivoli. And wouldn’t a cup of hot coffee be wonderful, Alice?”

  “Yes, oh yes,” Alice panted through her skins.

  I went upstairs and found my best frock coat with buttonholes of twisted black silk I thought might shine in moonlight. I boiled coffee and poured it into the electroplated Oriental samovar set on the table. Outside, I saw that Mrs. Levy had moved from the sofa to stand in a spotlight from the moon where her fur seemed to bristle with the instinct of its animal past.

  “How gorgeous you look, Mr. Tivoli,” she said, leaning against a tree and smiling as if about to start an aria. I poured the coffee into the queer glass cups they owned, and the ladies dipped down with eerily identical flower-plucking gestures and began to sip. I made some mmm’s of pleasure and they laughed again, free to love the coffee they had both been craving. Mrs. Levy motioned ghostily: “Please sit beside Alice, she’s a ball of warmth.”

  “I couldn’t …”

  “This coat itches,” Alice explained.

  “Please sit, Mr. Tivoli, you’ve worked all day and now all night.”

  I don’t think people own these tête-à-têtes anymore. Some minor god must have been punished for bringing them down to us. A tête-à-tête such as the one I found wet with moonlight that evening was a sofa shaped like an S, made of two armchairs facing in opposite directions but sharing a middle arm. You must picture it: a couple sitting ear-to-ear, glove-to-elbow. So when I began to take my place as Mrs. Levy instructed, and looked straight at my befurred and itching Alice, I was closer to her than I’d ever been. The wind blew and a hair floated out from her hat, stretched into the air, and landed on my lower lip, sticking there like a fishing line. I felt the hook bleeding into my mouth. Alice did not seem to care or notice but merely smiled.

  Mrs. Levy was posing against the tree, her fur falling open to reveal her scarlet departure from widowhood, which had taken place in the last few weeks. Jasmine bloomed around her. “Shakespearean again, isn’t it, Mr. Tivoli?”

  I dared not move or speak but stared straight at the mother, blinking. I noticed it was a full moon tonight and her movements cast shadows along the grass as if it were bright day. It occurred to me, as she talked, that she stood directly over her buried spoons.

&
nbsp; Then luck broke over me. There was a sound from the front of the house and Mrs. Levy bowed theatrically before doing the unthinkable: leaving her daughter alone with the neighbor, this kindly, elderly man.

  Alice said, “I think maybe I was born in the wrong time.”

  “What?” I tried to speak softly, not wanting to detach the hair from my lip.

  She stared away from me to where the moon was cresting the trees. Then she said, “Tonight, for instance. I love it tonight.”

  “Well, yes …”

  “Nothing modern. No kerosene lamps smelling things up, or gaslight. Hurts your eyes. No groups of people crowded around a stereoscope, or a piano singing another round of ‘Grandfather Clock’ for heck’s sake. I wish every night was just starlight and candles and nothing to do. We would have so much time.”

  I was afraid any minute she might turn around and the hair would fall away, uncoupling us. I wanted to say something to keep her talking, looking at the moon, traveling back to her simpler age, but I could say nothing. I just kept still, looking into her eyes.

  She continued in her slightly hoarse voice: “It’s hard to imagine such a different life. We’d think about light all the time. You know that when it got dark in winter and there wasn’t much light, you would have to do everything before sundown, well, there weren’t any streetlights on country roads back then, were there? How frightening. And you couldn’t read at night except by candlelight, and you probably saved your candles very carefully. Not like us. You made your own, they were everything to you, if you read books. And you had to read, what else was there to do? They had so few nice clothes they never went out. They didn’t have parlors or nonsense like Wardian cases and kaleidoscopes or watching magic lantern shows. There wasn’t any of that to do. There were just …people. Think of it.”